SW: Taken 3
Rest assured, there have been plenty of offerings so far this year that were more offensive, less intelligent, worse made, and a better example of why we should give up on both film and humanity (or maybe it’s just The Human Centipede 3).
Taken 3 looks benign by comparison: sloppy, embarrassing action movies are a dime a dozen. But we have to draw the line somewhere, and for me that line was Taken 3, the lazy, cynical crescendo of a franchise that’s been knuckle-dragged out to the tune of $1 billion dollars. “This is why we can’t have nice things” is the lesson writ large across this nauseatingly shot, incompetently assembled bit of blockbuster backwash.
What goodwill the original Taken inspired has been as used up as the franchise’s aging, exhausted star. Forget Liam Nesson’s daughter: so long as cashed-in, half-assed sequels like this are being rewarded, we’re the ones being taken.
IF: Insurgent
Talk about missing the point – the second installment in the supposedly female-powered Divergent franchise relegates Shailene Woodley’s Tris to a supporting role, letting hunky boyfriend Four (Theo James) extricate her from most of the serious binds she finds herself in.
A newcomer could be forgiven for thinking that the Divergent series is about a tattooed, hulking heartthrob and his tremulous, traumatized and danger-prone girlfriend. That’s what’s so damnably disappointing about Insurgent – it makes the fatal error of sidelining its real star, making her a victim, never a victor.
That dire miscalculation aside, Insurgent is a stale and stagnant sequel that cares more about junky special effects than any enjoyable plot progression. There’s no real momentum in this second installment – all it’s doing is setting up for the more climactic, two-film finale, biding its time and using a deluge of pointless conversations and action sequences to hide the fact that its plot could be written out in two short sentences. You’ll see through it in a second and wonder how the hell the franchise could have gone off the rails this quickly.
